Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Ending World’s Longest Nonstop Flight Adds Five Hours - SIA

The end of the world’s longest nonstop commercial flight, a 19-hour
slog between Singapore and New York, is bad news for Chia Teck Fatt.

Passengers
like Chia who are used to making the 9,000-nautical mile journey from
Singapore to Newark, New Jersey, will instead fly to New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport via Frankfurt starting next month, adding
five hours to their journeys.

Singapore Airlines Ltd. (SIA)
is stopping its services from Singapore to Newark with its all-business
class four-engine Airbus SAS A340-500 after ending the second-longest
flight from Los Angeles to the island city yesterday.

The inaugural Singapore Air
non-stop passenger flight from Singapore to Newark taxis to the gate
after landing at Newark Liberty airport on June 28, 2004. Photographer:
Stephen Chernin/Getty Images

“I’m looking for another
way to travel to New York,” said Chia, after checking-in at the
business-class lounge at Singapore’s Changi Airport dressed in casual
pants, t-shirt, a jacket and loafers.

With oil prices tripling in the last decade, the carrier struggled to ferry executives on the 100-seat flights profitably
for the past nine years, a sign that the airline industry is once again
putting profitability ahead of glamor. The iconic transatlantic flights
with the supersonic Concorde were scrapped a decade ago. The shrinking
of Wall Street firms and travel cutbacks after the global financial
crisis have made it difficult for airlines to lure top-dollar clients.

“It
didn’t make sense to continue,” said Siyi Lim, a Singapore-based
investment analyst at OCBC Investment Research. “The plane burns a lot
of fuel, but carries very few passengers,” he said about the Airbus
A340-500 aircraft.

Sydney-Dallas

SQ 21 will touch down
at Changi in the early hours of Nov. 25, ending the world’s longest
direct service, Singapore Air said in an e-mail. The second-longest
flight, between the city-state and Los Angeles, ended yesterday.

The Newark
service is about 16,700 kilometers long, while the Los Angeles flight
was more than 14,000 kilometers. The longest nonstop commercial flight
by distance after the end of these two routes will be Qantas Airways Ltd. (QAN)’s 13,800-kilometer flight from Sydney to Dallas. Qantas uses a Boeing Co. (BA) 747-400ER on that route, the Australian carrier said.

“With
the current price of fuel, it’s virtually impossible to make money on
ultra-long-haul flights,” said Singapore-based Brendan Sobie, chief
analyst at CAPA Centre for Aviation.

A return ticket this week on
the Singapore-Newark route costs as much as S$13,400 ($10,850),
according to the airline’s website. Flights to JFK via Frankfurt cost up
to S$10,700. Singapore Air’s spokesman Nicholas Ionides said the airline doesn’t provide financials for any of the routes it operates.

Superjumbos

The airline
will begin returning the 340-500s to Toulouse, France-based Airbus
starting this month. The deal is part of the carrier last year ordering
more superjumbo A380s, the world’s biggest passenger plane. Singapore
Air uses the double-decker aircraft, also with four engines and with
beds in first class, to fly to New York and Los Angeles through Frankfurt and Tokyo. The carrier has a fleet of 19 A380s.

Airbus
halted production of the A340 in November 2011, less than 20 years
after the aircraft’s commercial debut. That made it the planemaker’s
shortest-lived aircraft program. The company sold 377 A340s, less than
half the tally for the A330, with which it shared a production line,
Airbus said on its website.

“While
the price of fuel will have affected the cost of operating such
ultra-long flights, the A340-500 has performed extremely well in service
and has proven to be a firm favorite with passengers flying on these
routes,” Sean Lee, a spokesman at Airbus, said in an e-mail.

In-Flight Movies

Overseas travelers flying into JFK face the longest customs waiting time
for any airport in the U.S., with holdups as long as two hours,
according to a September report by the Global Gateway Alliance.

“The
Newark flight is so long that I can pretty much watch all the in-flight
movies,” said Banjo Castillo, a director at Unilever Plc in Singapore after checking in at Changi. Castillo flies twice a year on this route.

Singapore
Air started the world’s longest flight in June 2004 with 181 business
and economy seats. Almost four years later it was converted to an
all-business class configuration. The Los Angeles service, which started
in May 2004, was also retrofitted in the same way.

“SIA got
greedy,” said Shukor Yusof, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s in
Singapore. “It became less popular when SIA configured the cabins to
all-business, instead of the business-super economy mix when it was
first launched. It’s pretty much a fuel tanker in the air.”

Steak, Salmon

Four
pilots take turns to fly the plane for 19 hours while 14 cabin crew
members look after the passengers. The flight takes off from Singapore
at 10:55 a.m. and passengers are served three meals before it lands in
Newark at 5:50 p.m. Newark time, the same day.

Passengers get to
choose between dishes of rib eye steak and pan-seared escalope of salmon
prepared by the airline’s international culinary panel of chefs.

Manpreet
Singh Gill, 32, Singapore-based head of fixed income, currencies and
commodities investment strategy at Standard Chartered Plc’s wealth
management unit, says the non-stop flight boosts time spent at work or
with family.

“Ultimately, travel time is the least productive,”
said Gill. “The more time you add on the way, the further it keeps you
from either working or being at home.”

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